Sex in the Cities Vol 3 (Paris)

By Hans-Jürgen Döpp

Conveying six centuries of gallantry, serving as the world capital of fashion and love, Paris is the very symbol of eroticism and of joyful sexuality. Offenbach, in La Vie Parisienne, had already created a hymn dedicated to the pleasure of senses.

The author, with complete freedom, follows André Malraux’s approach by building an
imaginary museum, in a Paris where time no longer exists, space is neverending, and desire is always present.

The iconography is exceptional, coming from unpublished private collections and covering five centuries of Paris’ erotic story. It is accompanied by an academic text which allows the reader to discover this world, never vulgar and always subtle, from when the first man looked at the first woman: eroticism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Parkstone International
• Release date: Dec 31, 2015
• ISBN: 9781785259197

Book preview

Guide secret pour étrangers et viveurs

(Secret Guide for Foreigners and Roués), 1910. Book cover.

Introduction

Paris: The City of Love?

Throughout the world, Paris is regarded as the city of love and the erotic. To this day, the ideal destination of any honeymoon is a trip to Paris. But it is not only for loving couples that this proud city continues to be an attraction – tourists in search of extra excitement in love also pursue their fantasies about Paris. This is made apparent in a rather dubious joke:

A man confesses to his male friend: I’m off to Paris!, his friend replies: You bastard! The man about to set off corrects him: No, I’m not going on my own! I’m going with my wife!; You stupid bastard! his friend immediately counters.

What does one expect to find in Paris that can’t be found in any other city nowadays? What is so special about its history that has given rise to this myth? In 1896, Pierre Louys made two comments in the foreword to his novel Aphrodite:

It seems that the genius of nations, as well as individuals, is, above all, sensual. All the cities that have ruled the world – Babylon, Alexandria, Athens, Venice, and Paris – have, as if following a universal rule, been all the more powerful according to how dissolute they were, as if their licentiousness were essential to their glory. Those cities, whose law-makers strove for an artificial, narrow-minded, and unproductive virtuousness, saw themselves condemned to destruction from day one.

Apart from Paris, the splendour of the other cities has long since faded. Paris, however, still has a magnificent allure. Accordingly, we will need to pursue the history of sensuality in order to explain what historical experiences have gone into our image of Paris as the world’s most immoral city.

These historical experiences have also left their mark on the history of erotic literature and erotic art. We cannot separate this aesthetic area from the sensual one. Cultural history lives on in collector’s items that can often be found in museums today.

Comments and assessments made by foreign visitors to Paris will also always be of interest to us. As travellers they will have carried Paris’ reputation out into the wide world and thus helped to create the myth of Paris – in a double sense, for they have often come to the city not only as distanced visitors, but also as involved, participating observers, in search of pleasures not found at home. To this extent the reputation of an immoral Paris is a self-fulfilling prophecy. In allowing themselves to act out their illicit fantasies there, they could, upon their return and from the comfort of their own homes, condemn them as licentious, and thus restore their inner moral harmony.

The erotic myth of Paris has been fed by two different sources – not only the concrete developments in moral history whose main features we have attempted to outline here, but also by the fantasies which, especially from the 19th century onwards, have been projected onto Paris. This myth is an amalgam of fantasy and reality. And anyone who understands it properly will always find a certain sensuous open-mindedness in it. Paris is not a city for moralists.

Erotic postcard Curiosités Parisiennes – Arc de Triomphe, 1904.

Erotic postcard Curiosités Parisiennes,

No. 19 – La Bastille, 1904.

Erotic postcard Curiosités Parisiennes,

No. 21 – La Grande Roue (The Ferris Wheel), 1904.

Erotic postcard Curiosités Parisiennes – Place Vendôme, 1904.

Coloured lithograph, c. 1940.

The Parisienne – a Chimera?

"The Parisienne [Parisian woman] is the undisputed mistress of the city – now as ever, the city owes all its allure to her. To convince yourself of this, all you need do is go to the races or the parks, to stroll along the Avenue, the Champs-Élysées, the Rue de la Paix or along the boulevards – or even wander through the working-class districts. Everywhere you go, the Parisienne is a feast for the eyes, and nothing is safe from her influence…. Strangers to Paris are soon in for quite a shock for the eyes, as there is little difference in the way a wealthy woman, a petite bourgeoise, a salaried employee, or a working-class woman dress. Whilst in every other city in the world you can almost always tell at once a passing woman’s social class and income, in Paris this is extremely difficult. Even ordinary workaday women and girls look stylish and tasteful, always dressing in the latest fashion. How they manage this is their secret."

These words open Pierre la Mazière’s essay on The Parisienne and her World. But what are her characteristic qualities? What constitutes that certain something particular to the Parisienne, which accounts for her special charm? La Mazière answers the question as follows:

A unique mixture of sensibility and subtlety, of humour and grace, of good taste and sensitivity to nuance – but first and foremost an ability to make her body, her face, her whole personality into a work of art and – like no other woman in the world – her skill in wearing only the clothes that suit her.... She exudes the loveliest gift that heaven has given her – her superiority – her genius! Her fashionable elegance is constantly mentioned.

But her attraction is not limited to fashion-consciousness. She is surrounded by an erotic flair, something often misinterpreted as frivolity or casualness. First and foremost the Parisienne is a work of art, an artefact created in the heads of other people who long to meet her. In her, being a woman becomes something of a fetish: On every step of the social ladder a woman in Paris is a hundred times more a woman than in any other city in the world, Octave Uzanne writes in his study The Parisienne (Dresden, 1925). Uzanne continues:

People have written more thoughts, paradoxes, aphorisms, treatises, physiologies, and books both thin and thick on the Parisienne than they ever have about any other woman on earth. Thanks to the Parisienne, for all artists and lovers, streets in Paris turn into a magical Eden of sudden desires, of lightning acts of worship, and strange adventures…. The man who has learnt how to gape long and lovingly can, at any stage of life, refresh himself just by looking, admiring, approaching, and overhearing these pretty female walkers with their lively glances and well-scrubbed faces. His enamoured spirit constantly serenades these graceful daughters of Eve, whom he may never get to know, and his senses remain pleasantly aroused long past manhood’s curfew and twilight hour.

Jean-Baptiste Huet, c. 1780. Sanguine engraving.

Jean-Baptiste Huet, c. 1780. Sanguine engraving.

Just as Venus emerged from the waves, so the Parisienne was created from the enamoured spirit of visitors to Paris. Through her, man discovers his unfulfilled desires; a revelation about what he wants. Even though he will probably never meet her, she nevertheless exists within him as a stimulating fantasy. Uzanne quotes Bonaparte: A beautiful woman appeals to the eye, a happy one the spirit, a good one the heart. He continues:

Say what you will, the Parisienne most obviously combines all three qualities. Her beauty, or – to be more exact – her grace is piquant enough to arouse love; her energetic, rarely vulgar, always picturesque sense of fun is, as it were, the blossom and fragrance of our mental health; her profound, unselfish, unspoilt goodness awakens every kind of flattering devotion, all forms of heroism, all manner of sublime enslavement.

More than any other woman, the chimera of the Parisienne evokes an impossible trinity: she is mother, whore, and mistress in the one and same figure. A foreign writer once said of the Parisienne:

As a mistress she is adorable; as a spouse, frequently impossible; as a friend, perfection itself. Adorable as a mistress – it is mainly in this that her total superiority lies, for no matter what her social class, she represents the whole gamut of a woman in love. She is catlike in her use of flattery and childish ideas, as well as in her sudden acts of betrayal with the sudden unsheathing of her claws and sulking by the hearth. Her whims and wilfulness, her untameable peculiarities directed at anyone who wants only to possess her but fails to capture her heart, make her a luxury creature whom no-one but the chosen master, the conqueror, the loved-one can subjugate, dominate, and make happy at his pleasure.

Uzanne paints the portrait of a narcissistic creature who, as a fantasy figure, is simultaneously a collective product. The Parisienne flatters one’s own narcissism. The visitor to Paris who encounters his own erotic desires and vices in this fantasy figure is threatened everywhere by his subconscious – in the form of the prostitute.

The subconscious is wide-ranging and many-sided! It so unsettles a visitor to Paris that his glance verges on the paranoid: The secret prostitute appears all over Paris, notes Uzanne, it surrounds men whatever they do – in the hotel, the restaurant, shops and department stores, in bus offices, in the Louvre and Luxembourg Museums where she dons the disguise of a tourist guide. We encounter her in certain circles – even official ones – where she makes her appearance in a discreet, disguised, almost impenetrable manner.... She manifests every kind of pliancy and takes advantage of any disguise, gradually letting her mask slip and – wisely – only reveals herself at the best possible moment.

Le promenade… est’il tres amusante!,

from the series Femme du monde, 1940. Watercolour.

Mystères de Paris (Mysteries of Paris), c. 1850. Lithograph.

"Other secret sex-workers visit the art exhibitions, the art auctions at the Hôtel Drouot, lecture-halls, the reading rooms at Bon Marché and the Louvre, and the National Library – so familiar to those who work with their minds. In such places they sight serious men,